Stellar Spacecrafting: StarForge

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This morning I received an email telling me that the first playable build of StarForge was available. It’s a free first-person game of blocks and building inspired by the usual suspects, Minecraft and Terraria…and Warcraft 3, Borderlands and Halo. Something a little different to what I expected then, so I figured I’d at least watch the video that came with the press pack. Six and a half minutes later I was wondering how to put my excitement into words. Thirty seconds after that I decided to forget words and just share the bloody video. Watch.

I kind of wish they hadn’t put the defense stuff right at the beginning, or at least not so much of it, because it’s the procedural 3D tilesets, procedurally generated loot, building into space and movement physics that I reckon should be leading the charge. If there was too much of the turrets and the shooting for you and you drifted away, go back and watch again. You might end up having your lower jaw riveted back into place by the end.

I kept wondering how two men who had built something so impressive could describe it so calmly. I’d be whooping and hollering all the way through my own presentation. I sometimes whoop and holler when I manage to make toast successfully though so don’t read too much into that.

The other thought that rose again and again during the video was “where’s the catch?” Some of the physics are slightly wonky – slightly wonky physics! In a first release of a game this ambitious that can not only be forgiven, it’s compelling evidence that the whole thing isn’t an elaborate practical joke and that the developers aren’t robots from the future. So what’s the catch then?

This is the catch. Despite the first playable release being out there right now, I haven’t actually been able to play it yet. I blame Notch. The Minecraft maestro appears to have found out about the game before I managed to download it and he only went and informed eleventy seven billion of his Twitter followers to go and take a look, they overwhelmed the servers, and I haven’t been able to so much as visit the website.

I did make some toast earlier though. Go me! Small triumphs, that’s what great lives are built on I tell myself, small triumphs.

HexagonalBolts points out in the comments that there’s more information from the developers on the ‘free to play’ model that the game will be using:

All future builds along with multiplayer and singleplayer will be free. It’s F2P but not Pay2Win, we’re against that kind of stuff as we are﻿ huge gamers too.

We are selling Hatch Points so that players can purchase heroes with different playstyles, skins, 3D Tilesets, and cool stuff like a golf course pack where you can make your own golf course complete with greens, sand traps, and pick up some clubs and play. However, all of the paid stuff can be earned in game through enough play for free.

139 Comments

Well not everyone is as artistically talented as the guys making this game. And 3079 has actual NPCs and an RPG-ish mission structure, while these guys have more of an action/management focus with their game.

I’m not really sure I’d call 3079 more RPGish. The stat progression was badly triggered (many only increased on failure, one even on failure to shoot due to insufficient energy) and the NPCs weren’t really more than your regular monster. Yeah, half of them were friendly and you could hit E on some of them to buy stuff or get a quest but that doesn’t really make them feel more like people.

I shall build a penis that touches space, and then everyone will worship it as a deity. My disciples will then build the space penis further, until it touches God, but just with the tip, because it’s not gay unless the balls are touching.

I approve of this comment. To my mind the crazy spinning-man physics are hardly a bug and are more like a feature. I’ve always enjoyed playing with the broken parts of physics, trying to hit someone so hard they fly through a wall then out of the skybox, etc. I’d rather more developers didn’t spend millions of pounds fine-tuning the physics and animations so that it looks realistic, and left it looking like an AWESOME VIDEO GAME!

The ‘catch’ (I also assumed there would be one) seems to be that they’re leaving all the rough edges showing, which just makes it look very gamey and a little bit like you’re playing an FPS in a level editor.

but i would like to say unless it’s Cube 2: Sauerbraten, this isn’t what a FPS editor looks like. have you tried using Hammer? or maybe UDK? having personally played with all of them, they are ridiculously complicated and obtuse to the layman user. not to their detriment at all, though. developers need a flexible tool, and flexibility comes at a price.

I’m just saying, this looks more like a silly Halo 1 crossed with Minecraft than development software.

My experience is mainly of playing with much more basic RTS level editors. I thought this was especially similar to the SC level editor, where you placed down a square at a time of your type of terrain and it filled in the blanks/generated visual doodads automatically.

To me it looked like someone took the worlds of Myst and chucked them in a blender with Minecraft, Portal (the new editor) and added some fun with physics a la UT2004 or somesuch. I could easily imagine using those spinny things to create a sub-orbital platformer/shooter that would fit right in with UT or a not-too-alien worldscape to explore and solve my way through.

OK, so how about it’s pushing the envelope, or appealing to the core demographic, or its graphics being photospherealistic or helium flashy or even in RGB colour, or its Eddingtonumber one in the charts upon release? Surely RPS can Russell up a few more.

It’s amazing how many games have Hertzsprung up in the wake of Minecraft fever. Being able to craft/build in games seems to be parsec for the course now. This one does look pretty nice, but with all the shooting it may end up being a bit too MACHO for some. I think I’ll try it out once this inflationary period ends and their servers stop taking such a (late) heavy bombardment.

Everything about this is wonderful.
From the fact that it’s a labour of love all the way up to the fact that the graphics are almost on par (save for some polishing) with todays “triple A” (i use the phrase loosely ‘cuz frankly, in my opinion there’s nothing AAA about them) shooters.

EDIT: During the shooty demonstration, who else was reminded of this?:

It really doesn’t look anything close to a AAA game. It looks pretty good, considering the deformable tarrain and building, but the videos are extremely flattering, in actuality it’s far less impressive.

It’s also not really much fun to play at the moment. The controls feel pretty bad and the interface for building is really quite terrible so I think they still have a way to go. It’s definitely a very good start though, I really like the idea and the tileset approach to bulding blocks is a great idea.

The excessive motion blur and extreme-glare lighting everywhere did not strike me as good presentation, and I’m someone who didn’t mind LOVE’s art style so I have a pretty high tolerance for shitty after-effects.

Playing on ‘Fastest’ setting seemed to fix the crappy lighting, but motion blur is still in full effect. Actually things seem to go all blurry every time I start tunneling as well, might just be a weird rendering glitch?

Dear EA and Activision and any other publishers who love to screw customers and/or developers,

You dinosaurs have been getting hit by the ice age pretty hard, but so far you haven’t been too worried. After all, all the most successful Indies have yet to repeat their success. Besides which, all Indie games have relatively low graphical fidelity, simplistic simulation rules, and just can’t compete with the content that can be made with teams of hundreds. So you’ll just carry on being Tyrant Lizard Kings until the ice age ends.

Unless the mammals start eating your eggs. Gee, I sure hope that doesn’t happen. I mean: if too many games come along that are really fun and have great rule systems and ProcGen everything so customers don’t need to pay for new levels or content AND they’ve also got graphics to compete with your best efforts… Is anyone going to put up with your expensive, DRM-crippled, nickel-and-diming-DLC, exactly-the-same-game-we-bought-last-year, murdering-entire-franchises-by-saturating-the-market bullshit anymore? Or are all of your customers going to give the money to those who can make games combinatorically efficiently compared to your efforts? And when the big dinosaurs’ eggs are all eaten, they go extinct.

No more dinosaurs. No more blowing millions of dollars on clones of last years’ games. Just Indie innovation forever.

The real issue is the overhead, not the net or the gross. If overhead wasn’t killing you wouldn’t keep firing entire development teams right after the release of their games. With Indies, overhead is a non-issue. If the Indies can figure out how to make games that are artistically and technically indistinguishable from AAA titles with a tiny percent of the overhead (because they are Indie), then murdering you in your sleep, metaphorically speaking, is just a marketing issue.

You do remember how to do marketing without a multimillion dollar budget, right? Oh wait, you fired those guys long ago. Nevermind.

It’s wonky in the same way that most physics/rag doll simulations are wonky: they normally don’t deal with high-speed impacts very well. In this case I saw a moment where the character’s legs ended up inside of his torso.

This looks superb.
I want to be able to build good looking spaceships and discover other planets, do space mining etc.
I hope this is not MMO. I want an off-line game.
–
Notch should combine this with his new Elite type space game. He should work together with these two guys.
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This could become the most spectacular planetary/space Sandbox ever.

Considering the video description says their music guy made all the music in the trailer, yeah … Might be worth mentioning this to the two guys making the game, just in case they run into trouble down the track.

Judging by the guy’s Twitter he’s only just finished high school, so maybe he’s lacking a real world sense of responsibility. Don’t want to make unfounded allegations, but the devs will need to know just in case.

This isn’t the first case of one person on the team plagiarizing while the rest of the team is innocent. Hope they kick the bum out and find a good musician to partner with.

Also hope the guy isn’t a friend, because that will make things rather difficult. But there’s no excuse for plagiarism on a student or professional project. It doesn’t matter for test builds, internal alphas, personal hobby projects, and so on, but as soon as you’re publishing you need everything to be your own work or cited according to whatever licenses you’re using (e.g. creative commons). So this is just unacceptable.

Hello, this is the composer for the game StarForge. I see there is some jumbled up mess and confusion for the so called “sample” in the song for the midsection of the video. Sampling is quite common and popular with﻿ electronic style music, especially in the hip-hop department.
This is the song you guys are obviously referring to.link to soundcloud.com

The song that was used was a sample from the game Lost Eden. You are correct on the song. The song was something I was working on for fun on the past few weeks. Permission granted via email. It is being used for non-commercial use and no plans to use it in game. In a legal sense, you have the right to make use of other works as long as it qualifies under parody, education, commentary, and other categories that fall under ‘fair use’. In this case, this video was a “commentary”.

Thanks for pointing that out though. Hopefully I made this a bit clear to anyone who was curious.

It wasn’t nice when rappers and other music “composers” started sampling, and it isn’t nice now. Either credit the original work, or create your own. Remixes do not call themselves new names without including the original, why should you be allowed to with “samples?”

I’m sorry, but as legal as it is, it’s a complete dick move and shows no class.

Well, I really don’t think “fair use” applies here – this isn’t “commentary”, it’s promotion of a commercial product. I’m not saying that you were deliberately ripping-off the source material, I’m just suggesting that you should be a little bit more careful about what samples you use and get written permission from the rights owner for anything you use in relation to any professional work you do, otherwise you’re likely to land the developers in hot water when they release material you’ve provided in good faith that turns out to infringe on someone’s copyright.

“Hmm I can’t seem to confirm the crusader game one even after looking around. But Kevin got back on the first one and said he has the artists permission to sample that. It’s quite a common thing in the rap electronic music industry to do these things with permission so I don’t think there is anything to worry about. :)

It was this song: link to youtube.com. The Crusader sample wasn’t used in the trailer, it was in some tune on the guys bandcamp store page which i linked to above. The song seems to have been taken down meanwhile.

The controls /really/ need to be tightened up. It might be because of the framerate causing some input lag (alpha of course, needs a lot of optimisation) but I found the physics engine resulted in the continual feeling that I was tripping over my own feet – especially when climbing up hills. They’ll need to address that.

How the building cubes interact with each other on a model/texture level is pretty nice. Everything slips seamlessly together (at least on the tilesets I tried) and makes structural sense in that corners and posts are reinforced with struts.

Basically my only problems with it are things that will be tightened up or improved upon anyway – the control system, the mouse interaction, and the control of the player. I will be keeping a good eye on this.

Glad to hear they’re making randomised loot. The thing I was always got bored of in Minecraft and Terrarierrer was the fact you had to craft everything. It just removed the desire to explore when all you were doing was collecting different coloured blocks to be used in rigidly preset recipes.

Actually, in Terraria there was a good chunk of loot that wasn’t craftable – it would only drop from bosses, or from certain chests. Even the ores required for the late game craftable loot required a lot of exploration – for instance, the “only lands once – and it could be anywhere in the world” meteor impact.

They say that you can walk infinitely in any direction and the game will store all the alterations to the terrain you have made – I don’t know anything about computer technology, how is this possible in a game that looks so complex?

Adam you might want to include some information the video uploader posted in a comment on the youtube video:

‘All future builds along with multiplayer and singleplayer will be free. It’s F2P but not Pay2Win, were against that kind of stuff as we are﻿ huge gamers too.
We are selling Hatch Points so that players can purchase heroes with different playstyles, skins, 3D Tilesets, and cool stuff like a golf course pack where you can make ur own golf course complete with greens, sand traps, and pick up some clubs and play. However, all of the paid stuff can be earned in game through enough play for free.’

Something amusing that occurred to me – remember when people were freaking out over the new Wasteland game, because it was going to use Unity? That loathsome browser-game engine that nobody could ever produce a REAL game in?

Unity makes basic game making easier, without having to go under the hood, so people complain when they see people making basic games. Or people with goals well beyond their ability or patience.

The only real problem I have with Unity is that its physics system is rather recognizable. The first time I saw a video of Rochard, and saw how crates moved and such, I felt it looked like a Unity game. So it didn’t surprised when I found out it was indeed a Unity game.

Okay, it bugs me that culling is a Pro feature, not available in the free version.

Takes ages to load, runs damn slowly, has awful controls, has dreadful aura type things around most stuff, has to be run on ‘simple’ graphics at 800×600 (on a dual core 3.7ghz Phenom + GTX260!) to run smoothly, and has crashed all three times I’ve started it since I got it.

That does look pretty damn interesting! Will have to check out the alpha at some point, mostly just because I want to look up at that sky when it goes dark. There can never be enough games with beautiful night time skyboxes!

As for the 3D procedural tile sets, they look pretty brilliantly implemented, but I don’t think they are the first to do them. I’m relatively sure that Trials HD/Evolution has them for buildings in an albeit more limited capacity.

1) place something you’ll recognise
2) walk to nearest hill, keep tunneling horizontally
3) eventually you will break through to a cliff edge
4) build a gantry/pier out from there, say 60 squares or so
5) jump off
6) once you stop (you may fall through the world a few times first) you are not far from where you started; look for the thing you placed first.

Downloaded it. Played it. Way over hyped. These college kids are doing a great job with Unity and some Unity add on packs they bought but any kind of game, sandbox or otherwise, is a long way off. Building into space and endless terrains, let alone Multiplayer, are not simple and quick add ons.

RPS and Markus Persson need to tone it down a … grrr… hmmm.. hrrrr… notch… before they get everybody so excited about something that is really not even close to ready to go.

This seems like a fun technical feat, but I’m not convinced it will be a very interesting game in practice. I love sandboxes, certainly, but I like sandboxes with interesting game logic to create structure and choice within them.

In contrast, the collect resources > build things with digital blocks process feels a little hollow to me. I never feel like I’m really making any interesting compromises or choices, I’m never really dealing with the inconvenient results of my actions. I actually have a similar issue with Dwarf Fortress, where many tasks are purely beneficial, with no potential complications or downsides to manage. You sort of have to do purposefully dumb things to get interesting stuff to happen.

The project does look unique, though, so I hope it comes together and winds up being something worth investing time and money in.

Love the idea. Played the demo/alpha/thing and it’s pretty terrible as is; horribly optimized, movement is terrible – jumping anywhere with accuracy is essentially impossible, mouse acceleration makes placing things difficult, digging is cumbersome but fun, etc. All things that will most likely be fixed in newer versions.